Brow Beat

Jon Stewart Took Over Colbert’s Desk to Rip Apart Fox News’ Coverage of Trump

Jon Stewart has reclaimed his rightful throne: The comedian joined The Late Show this week to help cover the Republican National Convention, and on Thursday night, he took over his longtime friend Stephen Colbert’s desk to discuss Fox News after the announcement that Roger Ailes had resigned.

Plenty has changed since Stewart retired from The Daily Show almost a year ago, but as he let loose about his least-favorite network, it felt as though he had never left. In a 10-minute monologue, Stewart skewered Sean Hannity (referring to him only as “Lumpy”) for spending years reprimanding Barack Obama for being “a thin-skinned narcissist with no government experience”—only to turn around and embrace a thin-skinned narcissist with no government experience. The hypocrisy of Hannity accusing Obama of elitism for putting Dijon mustard on a burger, then supporting Donald Trump, who “sits on a literal golden throne at the top of a golden tower with his name in gold letters at the top of it, eating pizza with a knife and fork,” is ludicrous in itself, but with Stewart at the helm, it’s a scathing, acidic takedown.

Stewart’s argument reaches its peak when he points out that Hannity has been more than happy to question Obama’s Christianity but that apparently the pope himself is not qualified to challenge Trump’s religious motivations. And therein lies the truth of the matter, says Stewart:

Either Lumpy and his friends are lying about being bothered by thin-skinned, authoritarian, less-than-Christian readers-of-prompter being president, or they don’t they care, as long as it’s their thin-skinned prompter authoritarian tyrant narcissist. You just want that person to give you your country back, because you feel that you’re this country’s rightful owners.

There’s only one problem with that: This country isn’t yours. You don’t own it. It never was. There is no “real” America.

Stewart is far from the first to go after Trump’s racism or GOP hypocrisy, but there’s no denying he left behind a void when he ended his run on The Daily Show last year, and it was nice, even if only for a moment, to have him back.